This year's scholarship takes several directions, and most of
the items included below are brief. Brevity, or miniaturizing, is,
however, a hallmark in arts of the 1890s, thus current scholarship
coalesces with what it analyzes. Much noticed below also involves source
studies (influences from the 1890s upon later writers), though, unlike
many older publications that do little more than set forth parallels,
sans perceptive critical comment, these pieces contain penetrating
critical perspectives. Also, because of time lags between dates of
publications and actual appearances (either of the publication itself or
its availability on line or on library shelves), I mention several works
that antedate the immediate span of this survey.

For example, one customarily encounters Arthur Machen's name
and writings in contexts of supernatural horror fiction as it has been
associated with turn-of-the-century decadence. Therefore some may (or
may not) be surprised by "Hunting the White Whale: The Great God
Pan and Stephen King's N. (Machenalia 2, no. 8 [2007]: 44-51). In
this article, presumably by the editor, Gwilym Games, we discover
interconnected threads leading from Machen's "The Great God
Pan" to Moby-Dick and King's more recent "N.," in
his recent volume of stories, Just After Sunset (2008), as acknowledged
by King himself. He stated that The Great God Pan is "the Moby-Dick
of horror fiction," and that without it we would have no H. P.
Lovecraft, Stephen King, Robert Bloch, Clark Ashton Smith, or other
writers in the horror field--a strong claim, perhaps, but one from a
writer who thoroughly comprehends his topic, and therefore not to be
taken lightly.

Several other studies demonstrate the impact of nineties era
writers on modernist works. Kristin Mahoney's cultural-studies
approach in "Haunted Collections: Vernon Lee and Ethical
Consumption" (Criticism 48, no. 1 [2006]: 39-67) furnishes reasons
why the contexts in Lee's supernatural fiction, which
"formulates an ethical corrective to the subjectivism of modern
consumer practices" (p. 39), enfolds attitudes regarding
"consumption and pleasure [as] reformulated in terms of their
positive possibilities" in works by Pater, Wilde, or, later,
Bloomsbury Group members. Mahoney's argument makes plausible
companion reading for Regina Gagnier's The Insatiability of Human
Wants (2000), which offers a similar approach to this subject. One might
also profitably read in tandem with Mahoney, Lee O'Brien's
"Uncanny Transactions and Canny Forms: Rosamund Marriott
Watson's Marchen" (VP 46, no. 4: 429-450). O'Brien
approaches this body of her subject's work in part by means of
Freud on the Uncanny, showing how Marriott Watson's fairy-tale
world in these poems allows for a doubleness or demonicness that
"reflects dark possibilities that the daylight/social world
denies" (p. 434). Thus we have here poems that foreground how norms
may be transgressed, providing ambiguous feelings in the transgressors.
Such poems place late Victorian Gothicism (like that of Lee) as a
precursor to modernism.

Although T. S. Eliot's work has often been cited as
manifesting a revolt against all that was represented by what he and
others in his generation deemed "Victorian"--including the
poetry of the 1890s--ninties' sources for The Waste Land have
repeatedly been noticed. Two more such inspirations merit attention.
James Womack reasonably suggests in "A Possible Source for the
Seduction Scene in The Waste Land" (N&Q 253, no. 4: 491-492)
that his reading of Symons' The Symbolist Movement in Literature
(1908 edition) led Eliot to read poems by Symons, Wilde, and others from
the nineties. In particular, in the seduction scene ("The Fire
Sermon," 11. 235-256) alludes to Beardsley's poem, "The
Three Musicians." The tone in each is strikingly similar, and an
additional impact upon these verses of both may devolve from Pope's
The Rape of the Lock. Another inspiration for Eliot is located by Ian
Higgins in "The Waste Land and Dracula" (N&Q 253, no.4:
499-500). Higgins sees the apocalyptic element in Part V of Eliot's
poem as kindred to the theme in Dracula that the end of empire will
commence with an "invasion from the East" (p. 499). The
imperialist concept in each work features the appearance of vampire bats
as signaling the catastrophe of the coming downfall.

Still more of the 1890s in a major twentieth-century text is
assessed in Richard Brown's "More Sherlockholmesing in
Joyce's Ulysses" (N&Q 253, no. 1: 66-68). Although some of
Joyce's adaptations from Doyle are on record, Brown persuasively
argues that Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Missing
Three-Quarter" lurks in the background of the "Sirens"
episode in Joyce's novel, thus adding another piece to the mosaic
that is Ulysses.

Several other brief critiques must not be overlooked. Rodney
Stennings Edgecombe gives us another type of influence study in
"'A Sketch by Boz' and the 'Nightmare Aria' in
Gilbert's Iolanthe" (N&Q 253. no. 4: 480-481), revealing
how the dramatist borrowed techniques of dream sequence and its
conclusion--shattering of the nightmare by a witty juvenile as night
transforms into day--from Dickens' sketch, "Early
Coaches," in Sketches by Boz. Edgecombe's article implicitly
reveals that Dickens' novels were not his only writings that
lingered in the memory. Earlier in the century, of course, Poe had
championed Dickens' short fiction in preference to his novels.

The 1890s would not be the 1890s without Oscar Wilde, and
Keats's impact on Wilde elicits a considered reading by Ian Ross,
who sensibly evaluates the kindred strain of Grecian themes in the two
poets: Keats chiefly in Endymion, Lamia, and "Ode on a Grecian
Urn," and Wilde (at times inverting Keats's themes) in
Charmides and The Sphinx--"Charmides and The Sphinx: Wilde's
Engagement with Keats" (VP 46: 451-465). Ross amplifies our
awareness of Wilde's Hellenism, and his opinions may implicitly
illuminate aspects of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Oliver Tearle raises
an interesting point in "Dorian Gray's Schoolbooks"
(N&Q 253, no. 4: 463-465). Encountering the anomaly of how/why these
books were not mentioned late in the novel when others were, Tearle
allows that this omission may have been a lapse on Wilde's part,
given that these books were listed among those on the shelves in the
attic where the mysterious portrait was housed. More likely, however, is
the hypothesis that the evil portrait destroyed the schoolbooks because
they reflected childhood and innocence--what had vanished from
Dorian's existence. That the picture could have achieved such
destruction is consistent with Wilde's aesthetic in "The
Critic as Artist" (1891), a piece contemporary with the novel,
where Wilde states that great works of art live, "are, in fact, the
only things that live" (p. 465). A lengthier assessment of
influence or, perhaps more accurately, affinities appears in Marianne
Van Remoortel's "Metaphor and Maternity: Dante Gabriel
Rossetti's House of Life and Augusta Webster's Mother and
Daughter" (VP 46, no. 2: 467-486). Webster as poet was one of
Rossetti's literary "daughters," as others have made
clear. Submitting that previous scholars have, however, neglected the
mother-daughter relationship in Webster's posthumous poem (because
they seem more inclined to dwell on Rossetti's poem and on other
kinds of relationships), Remoortel posits that Webster highlights
maternal love as superior to heterosexual love. Doubtless this critique
will be provocative in several senses of that term.

Cheryl Wilson's "Politicizing Dance in Late-Victorian
Women's Poetry (VP 46, no. 2: 191-204), with its self-explanatory
title, reminds us of the overlappings in the arts of the 1890s.
Wilson's comment that although New Woman fiction has recently been
well served by publishers and critics the poetry relating to the New
woman has not. She seeks to rectify that lacuna, and her analyses of
poems by Mary Robinson, Amy Levy, and others in the era well serve that
purpose. Wilson bolsters her argument with references to dance and
conduct manuals from the era.

Several Housman items (all in HSJ 34) also deserve attention. First
Freda Hughes, also a poet, echoes AEH's The Name and Nature of
Poetry in championing emotionalism as a keynote of genuine poetry, as
well as subjectivity being essential to poem and reader. She also draws
convincingly on examples of later poems, not by AEH, in "The
Housman Lecture" to bolster her thoughts. (pp. 7-18). She exhorts
anybody who wants to know poetry to read many poems, thus echoing
another figure in the AEH carpet, Matthew Arnold. Complementary to
Hughes, Daniel Gillespie claims, in "Housman and Modernism"
(pp. 112-122) that AEH's Romanticism, as expressed in The Name and
Nature of Poetry, constituted an essential springboard for poets like
Pound and Eliot, who in many ways shared the older poet's
aesthetic, and, underlying that aesthetic, an intellectualism that
emanates from eighteenth-century views of poetry. These articles make
excellent follow-up reading to B. J. Leggett's books on AEH.

I thank Philip Hartnell-Mottram, Liverpool, for sharing his
expertise in Classical mythology with me.

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